Three works of art by Katie Paterson:
Endling, 2021. Mixed media in 100 pigments ground from the pre-solar dust of 5 billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku.Powdered and crushed materials for Requiem, "an urn filled with dust that maps the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day." Includes samples of ancient skeletons, lunar dust, microplastics, and trinitite formed in the first nuclear explosions, among many others.
The Moment, "a timepiece in the shape of a hand-blown (quarter) hourglass, filled with star dust—the fossilised remnants of a time before the Earth and before the Sun reminding us, always and in the moment, of the preciousness of time."
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Earth’s true age was disputed throughout the 19th century—Darwin proposed 300 million years, while the consensus was a more circumspect 100 million—but the startling truth was eventually revealed in a handful of dust. In 1910, Arthur Holmes measured the rate of uranium decay in a sample of Devonian rock and estimated that the Earth was new 1.6 billion years ago. In 1956, the American geologist Clair Patterson (no relation to Katie) extended Holmes’s result, establishing that the Earth is in fact 4.55 billion years old by counting the lead atoms in a meteorite that had fallen in the Arizona desert (he surmised that all bodies in the solar system coalesced at the same time). Timescales like these defy our imaginations. The most common analogy, coined by John McPhee, is with the measure of the old English yard: if the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched finger represented all of Earth’s long life, a single stroke from a nail file would erase the whole of human history.
David Farrier, "The Dust of Ancient Suns: Making Art and Meaning From the Depths of Deep Time." LitHub, 5/6/2022
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